Top 10% Admissions Reduced At UT-Austin, Will Affect Latinos
By Roque Planas, Huffington Post Latino Voices
It just got a little harder for Latinos to get into the University of Texas at Austin.
The Houston Chronicle reported this week that U.T.-Austin will only admit the top 7 percent of the high school graduating class, raising the bar for the highest graded students to enter the flagship university through the state’s non-race-based affirmative action policy.
A Texas law passed in 1997 required public universities to automatically admit the top 10 percent of high school seniors, but the law was reformed in 2009 to give universities more flexibility. Since then, U.T.-Austin has restricted the percentage of top-scoring students it automatically lets in to avoid losing the power to select students by other criteria. Last year, U.T.-Austin automatically admitted the top 9 percent of the graduating class and the top 8 percent the year before that.
The Top 10 Percent law emerged as a way to boost minority admissions after the Supreme Court overturned the use of racial quotas in its 1996 decision on Hopwood v. Texas. (A later decision revised the ruling, making it legal to use race as one of several factors to determine college admissions.)
To get around the problem, Irma Rangel — the first Mexican-American…
This article was first published in Huffington Post Latino Voices.
[Photo by alamosbasement]